Flyover Country

About a week-and-a-half ago, I took it upon myself to redesign my website. I had grown bored with the faux-magazine cover style that permeated the site (and still permeates this blog). Furthermore, the reluctance of Menalto’s Gallery 2 product to provide a decent user experience was wearing heavily upon my soul. So, I decided to build a new gallery web application for myself, in addition to everything else.

Although it is not yet finished (as glorious visions of a million animated under construction gifs dance in my head), things have settled down to the point where I think it’s safe to say that it has reached the proverbial web beta stage. Clearly, this blog has not yet received the glowing embrace of the new design, but I daresay it will soon enough. In order to ensure that I don’t completely hork the look and feel of my UI design blog, I’ve subjected my terribly neglected personal blog to the new style, and things are still shaking out over there. Perhaps moving to K2 at the same time was not the best idea in the world, but I felt it was a worthwhile endeavor.

In any case, should you choose to navigate the wide world of Brethorsting, here’s what you’ll find:

• A redesigned, highly spartan, 1024×768px-compatible home page with easy navigation and a big herkin’ picture of a randomly selected gallery.
• A new Résumé, which actually reflects what I’ve been up to for the past year-and-a-half.
• The redesigned personal blog, which appears to be mildly broken in IE 7 at present.
• A brand-new gallery app, which actually fits in to the look and feel of the rest of my site! Although usually I’m of the opinion that I’d rather pry my very teeth from their gums with an old pair of pliers than touch PHP, I’ve found that PHP 5 in conjunction with the Smarty template system and MySQLi makes things considerably less painful. Interacting with object-oriented PHP libraries is relatively easy. Trying to use the older procedural libraries still hurts terribly. The new gallery app is significantly lighter weight than what you’d find anywhere else, and only fits my needs. However, it is all nice and XHTML-compliant, renders well in IE 6 (astonishingly!), and even features drop-shadows and EXIF data.

Many features are still forthcoming on the Gallery app, but this feels like a great first step to having a personal website that I actually feel proud of. Now only if I could rewrite the whole thing in Ruby…

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I seem to have an action-packed Fall lined up for concerts and shows. Over the next couple months I’m going to see:

• Arcade Fire with LCD Soundsystem – September 24
• Interpol – October 18
• Spamalot – sometime in October
• Decemberists – Dec 8

I’m excited, to be sure.

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It looks like I’ll be flying out to Boston for the Remix Boston event on October 8 and 9. I will, of course, be there to talk with everyone about Popfly. I look forward to seeing everyone out there. Mix 07 was a blast, and I’m sure Remix Boston will be nothing less. I can’t wait!

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One thing I’ve got to give Sony is that they almost always know their stuff when it comes to innovative hardware design. Sure, the occasional high ticket item may look more like a George Foreman grill than the harbinger of high definition gaming, but who wouldn’t want to enjoy a tasty, low-fat steak while saving the world with Solid Snake?

I just ran across a video of a new music device, called Sony Rolly, which looks pretty cool. No clue if this is something they’re actually selling or if it’s just a prototype. Either way, it’s definitely Japanese. As someone far more amusing than me said recently, “Ultra future wave Sony Rolly for beautiful human life! Non Stop Golden Dance Hour, Feel the beat!”

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It’s another month, which means it’s time for another Popfly update! I have to say, shipping every month or so is a blast. Getting new bits into our users’ hands this often is a fantastic feeling, but it only works if you give us feedback on what you love and hate, so keep it coming! We’ve stuffed a lot of great, new features into this release, and you can find out all about them over on our official team blog. Given that I’m a UI guy at heart, I want to highlight some of my favorite, new Ux improvements:

 Block Categories - We now categorize blocks in the mashup creator in order to help you find the content you’re looking for that much quicker. We also differentiate between Microsoft and user-created blocks, and show block ratings!

 Block Editor – The Block Editor has received a visual overhaul, and now features the same great tutorial UI and block list as the mashup creator.

 Project Details - The Project Details page has received a lovely new visual overhaul, and now lets you automatically submit cool mashups you’ve created or found to Digg and Reddit.

 New Visual Style – I spent a lot of time over the past month ripping out our old themes and replacing them with a simple, elegant white theme. The new look and feel uses a fixed width on most pages, and a fluid, 100% width on our creator pages (mashup creator, web creator, block creator). All text across the site should be perfectly legible, and everything should work beautifully on 1024×768px screen resolutions.

 Project Browsing and Searching – Find all of the newest and top-rated projects in one location! Yay, we’ve wanted this forever, and we’re excited to finally have it implemented.

 Mashup Tweaking – Want to fiddle with a mashup without having to open the creator and mess around with that experience? We now have a lightweight tweaking interface where you can adjust the properties on your mashups quickly and easily. For example, my Gamerscore mashup can be changed to show your gamercard with significantly less work.

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I just installed a Lightbox plugin for WordPress, and I wanted to see how well it works before doing more “real” stuff with it (whatever that means). My girlfriend, Helen, and I wandered over to Discovery Park, a beautiful park on the western edge of Seattle, on Labor Day. We spent a few hours walking around and snapping pictures. Here are a few of my favorites:

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I noticed on Techmeme yesterday that Popfly received a great writeup in the New York Times as part of a broader article in Circuits about mashups. Here’s a quote from the article:

Now mash-ups are poised to hit the mainstream, and to spread well beyond music. Yahoo, I.B.M., Microsoft and others are creating systems to let ordinary people who’ve never been near a Java class create useful computer applications by combining, or “mashing up,” different online information sources.

It’s great to see consumer-focused mashup platforms in general, and Popfly in particular, get attention from the NYT.

Incidentally, I agree with the NYT: mashups are poised to hit the mainstream, and have a serious impact on the development of software. So does Eric Schmidt. Of course, being a little bit skeptical is never a bad thing, and It’s hard for me to say where we are in the hype cycle of mashups. What do you think? Best thing since sliced bread or a lot of hot air?

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